The Unravelled Frames

by Ariel Pytrell

"'Fear not, Umar,' it was Mara's voice," the writer records, and adds: "It came from behind me, from our dome's door. I saw her confront these male moles with an audacity that I could muster, although I recognized it would be at the cost of anxiety. She stopped before me, as though she would protect me with her small body, and told the leader: 'Tonight I'll be on the banks of the Notos river to submit to the judgment you intend.' Umar looked at her from head to toes. Then he looked at me, and blurted me out: 'How can you allow a Female to speak to me, you traitor?' With difficulty walking, I approached beside Mara, and I myself responded to that damned Umar, whom so many times I had defended and rescued from the Females' tortures: 'My daughter has spoken, man. I will support her decision. Be aware that I will defend her with my own bones until my last gasp.' Umar rested his gaze on Mara, then on me, and broke out in loud laughter. 'We shall wait for you on the Notos' shore at torches-time. I hope it'll be the last time I see this daughter of a Female contaminating the air of my Order.' He turned on his heel, indicating to his companions with a nod they left the door of my dome."

  The account of what happened that night is the last entry of that first part of the diary. We know the writer continued logging subsequent events as he did not die until much later. The reasoning for this assumption is beyond the scope of this work. It suffices to say here that the second part of Mr X's diary has not yet been found, except for certain fragments quoted by later writers, which would indicate that we are dealing with an authentic material. The account of that night is as pathetic as beautiful, as it is usual with the founding moments of human destiny.

  "[...] Mara had braided her hair. She had told me that she did not know how could have hit on that idea ('and so well,' I thought.) She had only asked me to join the ends at the back of her head. She had put on a long dress made by herself with fibers from plants that grow on the Notos shores. The weave of fibers was sufficiently tight as to look like a dress but also loose enough to detect the silhouette concealed underneath. She had asked me to place the wreath on her head, just as we used to do since she was a child between games and songs praising Mother Nature. Then we descended the knoll of our hill toward the valley of the Notos, where the torches lit by the men for that defining meeting was trembling like fireflies at the evening on the coast line. When they saw her arriving, they quite automatically stood up from their rustic stone seats, perhaps astonished before Mara's presence, her womanly beauty which they had never seen before.

  “She looked serene. Only a detail in her eyes, when she looked at me for the last time, revealed that her anxiety was controlled. She sat on one of the stones used as seats and did not wait for the men to give her the floor, she did it first: 'I am thankful for the opportunity you all have granted to me to be alive,' she said with one hand raised. "My Father has spoken to me about you with respect. And I only know the existence of men through him. I don’t know what happened between women and men — nor when this hatred happened nor why. I only know that it is not necessary, for there is much more to do and discover together, and because I have no doubt that societies were invented so that we might be aware of our integration as humans. I am thankful for that learning and for the simplicity with which my Father has taught me, firstly, to love my nature and, afterwards, to overcome it. Now it's up to me to do my part.' "

  "I admit I was not aware of Mara's intentions, since she never told me that she would speak, much less had she shared her thoughts with me. A kind of uneasiness caught up with my entrails, something was about to occur. Then, Umar spoke: 'What do you propose, Female? You are not welcome here any more. You have become what I already knew: the Female abomination that was promised.' I moved in reaction to those words but Mara raised her hand again, this time to stop me. 'I understand the fact that you have been grown up with hate, Umar,' she said firmly, yet warmly. 'I can’t do anything to avoid that, and it distresses me. I'm not here to bother you.' Then the leader's voice roared again: 'But you are here to destroy us, as you always do, damn Female!

  "Umar's words echoed in the valley. Beneath them, I could hear the murmuring of the river Notos. Mara was silent. The men looked at each other not knowing what would happen next. She spoke again: 'It is you who are here to destroy them, Umar. And this is what is gonna happen after I leave you in peace.' Now the murmuring of the voices of the Confreres drowned out the river's voice. 'I propose to sacrifice the Female," Umar said, spitting hate with his saliva. Some approved the proposal, others looked at me to find out my thoughts. And then I spoke, 'Men,' I said and I think I did it with authority. 'I have raised this young woman. I know her feelings, they are genuine. She has the best of both Females and Men, so she fears not the fear.There are not many of us, the Men, or of them, the Females. Why not start over again?' The murmuring became louder. Then something unexpected happened: the men began to fight among themselves, encouraged by Umar's words. Mara and I looked at each other without knowing what to do. 'Father!' she shouted as she held out a hand. 'Let's get out of here! Right now!' Her order seemed to me the most sensible of that moment or of many other ones before. I realized that I had to decide rapidly [...]."

  The writer narrates how he took his daughter's hand and they began to walk up the hill, accompanied by three men, the same ones who used to visit them, while "the others were focused on a community fight down in the valley." The writer takes his time to relate that, when they arrived at the highest part of the hill, shortly before reaching their own dome, they saw an advance party of Females approaching from far away and invading the male camp as they were screaming noisily and stirring up the nightfall dust. He also tells us how Mara's eyes reflected the torches' last orange light of the Notos. But it is better if we let Mr X himself tell it in his own way, and transcribe the last words of the last surviving part of his diary:

  "Suddenly I saw Mara's anxiety, I know she was curious to meet the Commufemes. But I also realized that she would fear a similar fate to those men who were now fighting in the Notos valley. I found a wave of emotion in the shinning of her eyes, which she shook off just before looking at me, smiling. ‘It's time, Father.’ And she, I, and the three male companions, we all walked ahead towards the opposite side of the valley of men, camouflaged by the night and the orange flickering of distant torches. The opposite side, as well, to the seething hordes of Females who were visiting the Notos for hunting. I do not know how long it is left to me on this decadent land but I do know that something new is about to begin. My steps confirmed it. Beyond being Female or Male, I am aware of my work by feeding the 'human being' inside an individual. I am leading myself, now, towards a new destination.”

  | AHBOLEH |

  Un paysage quelconque est un état de l’âme.

  HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL, Journal intime

  [Any landscape is a state of the soul.

  HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL, Private Diary]

  He did not recognise her at first. He had not been able to sleep very well all that day, he only seemed to doze at sunset. Not even the monotonous and familiar sound of the chimes managed to put him completely to sleep. Instead, the sleep had much earlier surprised Edmund, the white-skinned lad now becoming a man, who was resting in the old wicker chair.

  The insomniac had woken up startled at two-ten in the morning. He had been disturbed by the insistent noise of something that the wind was causing to bang. He gathered his effort and got up, or imagined that he did it. He guessed that Edmund was still asleep on the other side of the room in the wicker chair with his long legs resting on a bench, hugging the pest-proofed rifle. Then he advanced through the gray grid of darkness. At that moment, he could not see that the bushes were swaying as though pleading with the moon. He did not see the silent photographs on the piece of the furniture that, in a faded green, showed his youthful times when the old house was still full of people. Nor did he see the damp patches on the old walls in which several nails were missing. He did not even recognize her, camouflaged as she was within the shadows.

  He crossed, or imagined
he crossed, the gloom, and thought there was one more shadow, one of those that the old, tired eye usually sees. He had a strange feeling, a certainty of wonder, judging from the hairs on the back of his neck. He decided to confront that shadow; he, so old he could hardly see.

  Then, at last, he saw her, or imagined he saw her. She was alike as the one he remembered since he was a child, and because of whom his mother and aunt used to rebuke him. You, silly boy, stop doing that nonsense, they often told him, because that girl only existed in his imagination. But he, as a boy, used to see her just as he did now as an old man; and as he had seen her deep inside himself each time he looked in the eyes of children or animals; or when some melodies evoked her, even in the nostalgia that some raindrops evoked as they hung from the eaves. He, now old and nearly blind, saw her as an eternal girl.

  "Ahboleh?" he asked surprised. And the darkness moved a bit in the hallway. "Oh, yes, Ahboleh." And the old one fell down dead, or imagined he died. The old man's eyes were sunken in the dark hallway. Like an infinite screen, he recognized the girl, in an extremely vivid way, she who approached to play as she used to do so many afternoons in his sunny past, that unending and dusty afternoon of his birth-thinking. None but the shadows of that part of the night were there to witness it.

  The wind kept knocking on something outside. The bushes grew imperceptibly in that instant. Silence spoke in the voice of the night. And the cane chimes continued singing the agitation of his birthplace.

  | THE SOLITUDE OF EPIGRAPHS |

  Never speak secretely a word to me:

  distrust of any lock of the tongue

  since every secret ends up revealing itself.

  SOPHOCLES, fragment 935

  A part of the world is comprised of people who love the freedom to choose what, or to whom, they are to be enslaved. Pharmacists, judges, sports fans and religious people may belong to this group. Even teachers, butchers and stock brokers, merchants, hardware salesmen and car wash workers, free love groups' members and activists, employees, pedagogues, among many other jobs, many prevailing ones; many divergent; many others, already extinct. Another part of the planet is made up of those who hate the freedom to choose their oppressors and, as a consequence, they reveal themselves as protesters, ecologists, supporters of looting, hackers and revolutionaries and, in most cases, deaf anarchists and pluralists, sexists and discriminators. There are also some sadists, and the majority of the pimps, not to speak of the marginalized and the cynics. In nearly all these cases, none of their individuals is completely aware of such operations. But there is still a third group that makes up the world.

  What I am about to state now may perhaps be extremely dangerous to my integrity since it deals with the truth. I have shown myself that the truth will never be fully accepted the first time it is seen. It is quite similar to what is told in ancient myths where it was asserted that the gods had to appear in human-like form before mortals if they did not want to annihilate them with the most brilliant of the lights of their true form. In such a context, nevertheless, here is my statement.

  There is a very small part of the world which is not free to choose either its oppressors or its liberators. They are condemned to live with the truth as it is, to recognize it instantly. So much so that they cannot escape from it without being somehow committed to the paradox, to the brutality of a timeless or out-of-space universe, to the vertigo of the oxymoron, to the resolution of solipsism. There are a very few in this group, and even fewer are those who know its existence. The latter ones have reduced them to a category of disease as though it were a mutation which is not completely elucidated and named after its discoverer, an early 21st-century psychiatrist: "Gorser disease."

  Belonging to this group was Dr Guillermo B. H. Pronceda, a scholar who became obsessed with epigraphs, he himself being an outstanding epigraphist at the University of Penzalosa and who, in his free time, used to cooperate with the government to clear up certain difficult unsolved crimes. In this way, he exposed the circumstances of cases, such as, among many others, that of the Torso Murderer or the Black Dahlia Avenger, or the Tylenol Murder. Thus, he revealed the identity — identities, indeed — of the so-called "The Whitechapel Murderer," a mystery of more than a century.

  The scholar lacked any social life. He lived, if you can call it that, in a veritable prison, though it was actually a gigantic room, the 36th in Holosa Palace, where Presidential families usually reside. He was confined there for years, from shortly after graduation, when his genetic alteration was discovered. The government boys suggested that he should be analysed and pensioned for the rest of his life. Relatives and friends considered him ill, so they received a not inconsiderable annual sum to keep his existence a secret. He has spent a substantial portion of the years in this room classifying and translating ancient epigraphs although he took decreasing pleasure in the task, which he alternated with research for the University. Among his relatives, only his sister and nephew, and sometimes his brother, come to visit and tell him about the world outside room 36. But he would confuse everyone with his "friends," phantoms of whom I'll talk soon. The truth is that he himself began to look like a kind of distant phantom to others' gaze.

  I was the one who used to visit him daily as the agent in charge of his nutrition and to take him difficult cases so that he could help us solve them. Lately, I had seen him increasingly obsessed with his "friends," those characters which are nothing more than images from pictures and photographs of different periods that decorate the high walls and shelves. He seemed to be able to see the previous and subsequent movements, during several minutes, in the shooting of a photograph or the making of a picture.

  As a result of several famous facts he revealed, he has been placed by the government at that high level. For example, “The Field of the Magnolias,” which is but one of the 19th century's first photographs taken a while after the Battle of the Magnolias. In the image, General Oleander was photographed posing next to his horse. Pronceda was able to discover what the hero was actually seeing thanks to a reflection in the animal's eye showing a loop-like movement. Such a discovery, which had remained hidden right there in plain sight, changed a part of the history of our country. Or when, for example, in his new guest/prisoner state, the well-known "Allegory of Faith" by Vermeer was brought to him to reveal the painter's actual face also in the reflection of the glass sphere. On that occasion, the scholar said that he could see the mirrored movement of the painter while making the painting before the intense gallery light in the background.

  For some time, we used to hold long coherent chats. But a year or so ago I began to have the impression that Pronceda could no longer distinguish past or present. It is possible that for him, time had become an alien notion since he only perceived the movement of time, not time itself. Somehow, at this point, I began to realize that he did not know his own existence.

  The last time I heard him speak somewhat coherently was when, in a personal capacity, as there was no official mission, I took him a photograph which had belonged to my great-grandfather's brother. What he unravelled was a truth that would have made me take leave of my senses as if it were the unspeakable beauty of a koan, rather than the audacity of puzzlement or the absurdity of contradiction. And it consecrated the bond between us, which makes me understand now through what kind of meandering of time he was spinning around as though he were a dry leaf surrounded by a breeze and stuck in a bend. But, to attest to this, some explanations are necessary.

  Within my family there existed a version of certain events occurred in the past that all of us who were born later had to accept as "official." Evidently, that was considered ancient history in spite of having occurred a little over one hundred years ago. Therefore, it was an unachievable story although the protagonists bore our own surnames. When he was still young, my great-grandfather had been tried and condemned to death for having killed his wife, although his brother had defended him even after execution. Because of this, my great-granduncle was com
pletely ostracized by the family and the country. The children of the executed one, my grandfather among them, were sent to the different members of the maternal branch, and they never in their lives saw each other again. This is the story that circulated through my house's corridors.

  When, three decades after that event that restructured my family, my grandfather was coming of midlife, he received an envelope with a letter and the picture I showed Pronceda that day. The sender was that uncle who had defended his brother in the past, the same who would have been a very old man by then, according to my grandfather's calculations. My grandfather, as he himself told me, never knew what the letter said since he was illiterate. Quite soon the letter was lost or made to be lost. But he kept the photograph very carefully, far-off from everyone, for it showed nothing, although he suspected that it would mean much to him.

  From here on, the story is tangled a bit in twists and turns. The synopsis is more or less as follows. My grandfather wanted to pass on that picture (and perhaps the letter) to my father, but the latter was too much a protector of family myths and rejected the request of his father —my own grandfather— to continue the research. This led to a deep and almost violent disagreement between my father and my grandfather. For that reason, once I was of age, the latter came to me with his concerns. Shortly before he died, my grandfather showed me the photo and both of us, for days, were reviewing theories and discarding the "official" versions.

  I confess that this investigation ignited a lively interest in me, I became a police officer. Afterwards, I enlisted in the Intelligence Service of my country. Now I work for the government as a special agent in cases considered impossible. But I am more interested in the training of new agents, perhaps because of my forthcoming retirement. And due to being tired of seeing so much historical and ideological manipulation.